Archive for July 18th, 2011

Today was day 1 of rebuilding and modifying our prototypes based on information gleaned from testing and demoing them. Dean took apart his Tank robot so that the other groups would have more pieces for their own projects, since he used almost every single flat plate and most of the long bars, as well as a ton of screws and nuts. I used this opportunity to take a SAM animation of him taking it apart, taking a picture every 2 seconds. We ended up with 2545 pictures for a total of 5090 seconds, or 84.8 minutes. We decided to run the resulting video at maximum fps, (30.3), resulting in the below video.

Also, the two other groups spent today taking apart their prototypes and redesigning them. The Axel Rover’s base was taken apart and new designs were thought up. The Carrier bot’s prototype, which was at this point just a simple robot with an arm holding an ultrasonic sensor for finding craters/table edges, was taken apart and an entirely new robot was started. Using four of the longest Tetrix beams and all the flat pieces Dean took off his tank, the base of the Carrier bot was built.

Daily Thoughts:

Lawrence: Today we took apart our old rover and completely reconstructed it. We did this all day and still didn’t finish it so it got frustrating. We tried many ways to make our rover and we still haven’t solved it.

Jess: After a rather relaxing day on Friday, and then the weekend, we had to buckle down to actual work. We started to take apart our prototype rover, as I wanted to see if I could create a better model by redesigning the base and such. I got it deconstructed within the day, and started brainstorming new ideas. Construction also began on a new base, which was rather frustrating.

Briyana: My partner and I took apart our old robot to expand and improve and have got a new base where the smaller robots (which will be built by the middle school students) will wait to be deployed.

Sarah: We took apart the old robot and built the base of the new robot.